Week 8 Reading Rockets

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/top-10-things-you-should-know-about-reading
 I chose the article: Top 10 Things You Should Know About Reading By: Reading Rockets.

I found this article to be very interesting. Three important ideas/things from the lesson today are that thirty-three percent of American fourth graders read below the "basic" level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test, difficulties in decoding and word recognition are at the core of most reading difficulties. Poor readers have difficulty understanding that sounds in words are linked to certain letters and letter patterns. This is called the "alphabetic principle", and What preschoolers know before they enter school is strongly related to how easily they learn to read in first grade. Three predictors of reading achievement that children learn before they get to school are:

• The ability to recognize and name letters of the alphabet
• General knowledge about print (understanding, for example, which is the front of the book and which is the back and how to turn the pages of a book)
• Awareness of phonemes (the sounds in words)

, but the most important thing I learned today is as many as two-thirds of reading disabled children can become average or above-average readers if they are identified early and taught appropriately (Vellutino et al., 1996; Fletcher & Lyon, 1998). These facts underscore the value of having a highly trained teacher in every classroom.